^9, I agree that $20 seems like not much, but if the daily wage there is something like $4 (quite likely), then they stole someone's whole week's pay. That's not trivial, and frankly - if you did it for a good enough reason, you should accept the punishment if you're caught.

Cryptanalysis of the Enigma enabled the western Allies in World War II to read substantial amounts of secret Morse-coded radio communications of the Axis powers that had been enciphered using Enigma machines. This yielded military intelligence which, along with that from other decrypted Axis radio and teleprinter transmissions, was given the codename Ultra. This was considered by western Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower to have been "decisive" to the Allied victory.[1]

The Enigma machines were a family of portable cipher machines with rotor scramblers.[2] Good operating procedures, properly enforced, would have made the cipher unbreakable.[3][4] However, most of the German armed and secret services and civilian agencies that used Enigma employed poor procedures and it was these that allowed the cipher to be broken.

The German plugboard-equipped Enigma became the Third Reich's principal crypto-system. It was broken by the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau in December 1932